---
page_title: Terraform versus alternatives overview
description: Terraform lets you define infrastructure as code and automate infrastructure lifecycle management. Learn how Terraform compares to other cloud infrastructure tools.
---

# Terraform versus Alternatives Overview

Terraform provides a flexible abstraction of resources and providers. This model
allows for representing everything from physical hardware, virtual machines, and
containers, to email and DNS providers. Because of this flexibility, Terraform
can be used to solve many different problems. This means there are a number of
existing tools that overlap with the capabilities of Terraform. We compare Terraform
to a number of these tools, but it should be noted that Terraform is not mutually
exclusive with other systems. It can be used to manage a single application, or the
entire datacenter.

Learn how Terraform compares to:

- [Chef, Puppet, etc.](/terraform/intro/vs/chef-puppet)
- [CloudFormation, Heat, etc.](/terraform/intro/vs/cloudformation)
- [Boto, Fog, etc.](/terraform/intro/vs/boto)
- [Custom Solutions](/terraform/intro/vs/custom)
